Creating, editing, and reviewing documents often involves a number of different people involved at different stages of the documents. The creation of documents involving group collaboration can include incorporating work product from a number of different people into a final product. Additionally, a collaborative document creation/revision process can involve more than one person working on the document at the same or different times and/or in the same or different locations. Some people also prefer to create/revise documents using physical paper, such as by printing out the documents for revising and/or making notes. Accordingly, verifying that any modifications made to the document at any time during the process are accounted for when creating a final version of the document is an important part of the creation/revision process to ensure that the final product is complete and accurate.
To provide better collaboration in a document creation/revision process, some conventional systems allow users to share electronic documents via various electronic communication methods. For example, some conventional systems allow users to synchronize electronic documents (e.g., to a cloud storage service) to a shared workspace, which allows the collaborative group members to access the electronic documents from their own devices. Additionally, such a shared workspace allows the users to work on the electronic documents from their own devices at any time and then share any new content or revisions with the other group members. Sharing a document with such a conventional system, however, often leads to conflicting copies of the document on the separate devices of the users or in the shared workspace if multiple users access the document simultaneously.
To improve the document creation/revision process, other conventional systems allow users to work within a shared document at the same time. Specifically, a cloud system that hosts a shared document and provides simultaneous access rights to the document for a plurality of users. Accordingly, a plurality of different users can view and modify a single document at the same time via the cloud system. Providing simultaneous access to an electronic document for a plurality of users to modify from different devices reduces the need for users to upload the document each time they make revisions.
While conventional systems provide environments for collaborative creation and revision of documents, the conventional systems fail to account for physical copies of documents in the workflow. Specifically, although the conventional systems allow one or more users to store electronic documents in a cloud storage for accessing from any number of different devices and locations at the same or different times, incorporating changes made to physical documents into the electronic copies can be cumbersome and easily forgotten. For example, conventional systems typically require a user to manually enter the changes from a physical copy into the electronic document. Similarly, conflicting revisions or information between physical documents and their corresponding electronic document counterparts are not easily resolved using the conventional systems. These and other disadvantages may exist with respect to conventional collaborative document creation/revision techniques between physical and electronic documents.